ABSTRACT
Three and a half decades span the time that we first arrived to live and work in Asia in 1955, newly married, my wife Ronnie, newly pregnant. This span approximates the forty years of independence experienced by ex-colonial countries. I want to stretch this reflective history back another decade or so to include some of what I brought with me then: my five wartime years in England as machine operator in an engineering factory, followed with four years up and down coal mines, docks, and other settings in which people live and work, my beginnings in cross-cultural work (on European cooperation) and my first sabbatical in a university—a Ford Foundation-funded followship for practitioners to the Harvard Business School. Both the Tavistock Institute in England and NTL (the National Training Laboratories) in America were born during that decade and I had early associations with them. “Experiential training,” “T groups,” and “turbulent environment” as well as other concepts now quite familiar stem from that time. Harvard added the case method for training managers.
